Skyrim - On Skyrim's NPC and On Gaming's Old School and Legend

January 2nd, 2012, 00:27

Two more newsbits for this game has surfaced. The first one is Positech's Cliff "Cliffski"Harris who looks at the NPCs in Skyrim, the second one is an editorial at GamaSutra who longs for how the TES game used to be in the 1980s and 1990's and thinks that Skyrim brings some of that old school feeling back.
As usual, some excerpts, beginning with Cliff "Cliffski" Harris from Positech:

Itís voice acting isnít it? Lets be honest. We cannot afford to have 500 different lines fo dialog for that character, because the assumption is that all games need to be Ďfully voicedí. This is CRIPPLING to AI. I bet the AI coders on skyrim grind their teeth like maniacs, knowing that the simplest and cheapest text adventures can have twenty times more immersive character interaction that the trillion dollar AAA hit game skyrim.

More than one of my gamer friends has told me about entirely inventing imagined endings for games they could tell others about, just to propagate legends and make others believe they'd achieved something no one else had. The enormously complex culture of myths and secrets that was part of the experience of being a gamer when we were young just doesn't exist anymore. But with Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, gamers seem to be getting a little of that cult storytelling back. Indeed, I've a hunch that therein lies much of the game's appeal: Skyrim certainly isn't successful because of its degree of polish, its cohesion or even its originality (I see it having none of the above in notable quantity).

The two articles contradict eachother. The further back you go with TES games the more generic and random everything about them is. The first, arena, offered quest NPCs that were all exactly the same. You got the exact same dialog from every NPC of that type in the town, and furthermore NPCs of that type gave you the exact same dialog tree in towns on the other side of the map.

Itís voice acting isnít it? Lets be honest. We cannot afford to have 500 different lines fo dialog for that character, because the assumption is that all games need to be Ďfully voicedí. This is CRIPPLING to AI.

This person's revisionist history is crippling to RPG development. If we're going to be honest, we have to admit that Bethesda's games more closely resemble actual RPGs now that they did 20 years ago. And in any case, "we" damn sure can afford all the voice acting necessary for a big budget RPG. Top selling games make more money than movies do these days, and voice acting is a hell of a lot cheaper and easier than the real deal, especially considering programmers and designers are doing everything except the voice. Game companies who play the "it costs too much" card are just making excuses for their tendency to do everything the easy way because they think nobody cares. Look at what the big names in RPG development were saying about the games they were making ten years ago for proof of that. They were openly admitting they were deliberately making games (much) shorter and implementing sudden unexpected endings because studies showed "most people don't finish RPGs". Does that sound like the kind of mentality that's really and truly looking for ways to add more depth and complexity to the modern RPG experience, or does it sound like the kind of mentality that's trying to cater to the lowest common denominator while making development as easy as possible?

Oh. I'm almost positive that I couldn't run from one end of the map to the other in 5 minutes realtime in TES Arena. So, if they want to find something to claim was done better in the older TES games that would be it. That's the only thing I can think of, myself. The game world's were larger. Probably because they were randomly generating most of the content, and it's quite easy to be generous when you're re-using the same resources over and over again.